Wednesday, August 28, 2013

As the marketplace becomes increasingly crowded with
products, it is becoming tougher for companies to stand out amidst the noise
and clutter. In the past, product packaging and messaging were the most
important aspects. Now, those elements are still critical, but in addition, you
need to offer your customer a unique experience they won’t get anywhere else.

The customer experience (CX) is a blend of a company's
physical performance and the emotions evoked, intuitively measured against
customer expectations across all touch-points. This means that every time a
company and a customer interact, the customer learns something about the
company that will either strengthen or weaken the future relationship - and
with that - the customer's desire to return and recommend. Excellent customer
experiences are still so novel that, when we have one, we talk about it.

The CX is all about doing things that will be memorable and
of value to the customer. Start with the basics and fundamentals. Once you’ve
gotten them right, you will have earned the customer’s trust and repeat
business. There are plenty of companies offering what you offer, so be
decidedly different. With that being said, according to Business2Community,
here are four things you must stop doing if you want a stand-out CX.

Stop asking the customer to repeat information. This includes
asking them to repeat identifying information already keyed in while listening
to prompts.

Stop having all employees greet the customer when entering a store. Let
one do it and then stop.

Stop being oblivious. Get your team to recognize current customers.
Encourage them to check the database and acknowledge the customer specifically.

Stop being scripted. Customers want a real person delivering
sincere service. Allow your team to build a relationship and use judgment.

There are an array of things organizations need to start
doing but get started by stopping certain irritating behaviors - it gives the
customer a chance to think about taking their business to the competition.

Amanda Ciccatelli,
Social Media Strategist at IIR USA, has a background in digital and print
journalism, covering a variety of topics in business strategy, marketing, and
technology. She previously worked at Technology Marketing Corporation as a Web
Editor where she covered breaking news and feature stories in the tech
industry. She can be reached at aciccatelli@iirusa.com. Follow her
at @AmanadCicc.

Monday, August 26, 2013

Due to the high volume of submissions, we suggest you submit your proposal
early and no later than Thursday, August 29, 2013 to Rachel McDonald, Senior
Conference Producer at rmcdonald@iirusa.com or 646.895.7405.

The Total Customer Experience Leaders Summit is an event that showcases B2B and
B2C trends, insights and best practices for designing, measuring, aligning and
communicating your customer experience strategy to ensure business relevance.

A Three Day Conference Experience Featuring NEW Topics:

Customer Experience Design & Measurement

User Experience Design

Design Research & Methods

Redesigning a Program

Analyzing VOC

Design Thinking

Loyalty Measurement

Data-Rich Insights & Analytics

Big Data Initiatives

Social Media Engagement & Feedback

Customer Insights

New Technologies & Methodologies

Internal Customer Index Scoring vs. NPS

Enterprise Feedback Management

Strategy & Alignment

Using VOC to Take Actionable Insights

Engagement Learnings

Monetizing Your Customer Experience

Recovery Strategy

Linkage to ROI

Customer Service Strategies

Aligning Customer Touchpoints

Combating Survey Fatigue

Linking Data Sources

Personalization & Customization

Driving a Customer Centric-Culture

High Level Keynote Sessions that Focus On:

Innovation & Creativity

Operational Perspective

Chief Listener

Customer Before Profit

Culture & Change Management

The Role of Emotions

Developing Relationships

Digital Customer Experience

Customer Behavior / Generational Nuances

Leadership

Global Perspectives

We are also happy to consider topics not listed here that
you feel would add value and be appropriate.

Individuals seeking to enhance their own company's
capabilities in these areas (become more customer-centric and drive business
results through improved customer experience), and willing to help others
advance through sharing of best practices and experiences

Sponsorship & Exhibition Opportunities

If you are interested in sponsorship or exhibit opportunities please contact
Jon Saxe, Business Development Manager at jsaxe@iirusa.com or 646.895.7467.

Wednesday, August 21, 2013

You may have heard people say, “It’s not about us. It’s about them, the
customer! The implication — what sounds enticing to the recipient — is that
these people believe that customer-devoted organizations drive significant
profitable revenue growth and they execute strategically against their
proclamation daily. Unfortunately, most often, nothing could be further from
the truth, which is why many companies’ PRG remains anemic — a sign of a
non-customer-focused organization. According to Kansas
City Business Journal, here are nine proven methods of living the
customer-centric mantra.

9. Your customer’s issues ARE your issues. Third Door clients understand that the
function formerly known as sales is now 80 percent “research.” They know that
relevancy, demand creation and attraction are the front-end drivers of
sustainable PRG, replacing ineffective sales techniques. Therefore, what
procedures and technology are used to feed you this information that helps
create the desired positioning?

8. Honor thy customer. Think about a card section in a local
grocery store that showcases designs by customers, displaying where they’re
from by city and state. How do you think that makes the consumer feel? How is
your customer council structured and how is the all-important state of
co-destiny achieved?

7. Further your customer’s purpose. Try this as a sales call opening: “I
understand what you do. However, I’m curious why you do it? If I can understand
that more clearly, I can better determine if we’re a good fit.” With this
information secured, share how your value proposition helps strengthen the
client’s “true north.” And because your organization’s objective should be
profitability, so it can provide jobs and sustain the community in which it
serves, then your primary prospect qualifier is shared purpose, right?

6. Help advance customer’s value proposition. The definition of value proposition is,
“The crystal clear statement of the tangible results the customer receives from
your products, services and experiences.” So how are you positively impacting
your customers’ tangible results? If you’re not influencing customers’ key
performance indicators then you’re a commodity.

5. Fortify customer’s competitive advantages. What your customer’s top brass wants more
than anything else are new, challenging and effective ideas. If you’re in
sales, when’s the last time your boss asked, “When is the last three times you
challenged a customer and provided new, innovative thoughts?”

4. Delight your customer’s customer. What are the needs of your customer’s
customer? The only thing more important to your customer than his/her
profitability is creating more happy and loyal customers.

3. Pay it forward. A past client, a well-known restaurant, is led by
a chef who had an idea to reward loyal patrons, by surprising them with their
favorite dinner served at home, with live music. Then, the couple suggested the
chef do the same thing for a family in need they knew. How does this story
square with your charitable efforts? As has been said before, the greatest
marketing strategy ever devised is care.

2. Employ customer-centric key metrics. How do you integrate the “voice of the
customer” into your management dashboard? One team, one all-important score,
people. And that “score” should lean toward some type of “customer delight”
measurement.

1. Customers help design your value proposition.
When strategic planning is performed at your
company, the customer’s voice is absent. Have you ever asked customers why they
buy from you?

Wednesday, August 14, 2013

Today, Starbucks Coffee Company has become almost as
well known for its free WiFi as its coffee. The $13.3 billion company provides
a model of combining a physical retail operation with digital channels. It has
more than 34 million Facebook likes and more than 3.6 million Twitter followers,
and is successful at using social media and mobile technology to create
unforgettable customer experiences.

In fact, recently Google and Level 3 Communications have
partnered up to provide wireless service at Starbucks U.S. locations. The new
Google WiFi will initially be seen at new locations over the next month and
then be rolled out to its remaining 7,000 locations across the country over the
next 18 months. According to Level 3 CEO Jeffrey Storey, the company is working
with Google to provide Starbucks with a differentiated experience for customers.

“We will do the things that we do best – building and
managing complex network services to support that infrastructure. And, Google
will do the things that they do best and make sure that they provide a
differentiated WiFi experience that they will at some point, use that portal
and that interface to, for example, offer seasonal drink coupons to the
customers as they walk in,” he told Diginomica.com.

Starbucks Chief Digital Officer Adam Brotman said it’s the
next step in the relationship between the coffee giant and Google. Currently, Brotman
is responsible for delivering wider digital thinking at Starbucks, which is key
to its customer experience (CX) strategy.

“From the digital perspective, we spent the past several
years building an engine of digital touch points with our customers that not
only allows us a deeper relationship with our customers, but also pays off with
incrementality for our business,” he commented.

A critical tool for Starbucks is its loyalty card program
which has seen a 100 percent year-over-year growth in dollars loaded via
Starbucks mobile apps and Web properties. Over 10 percent of all transactions in U.S.
stores are made via mobile phone, according to Brotman. So, mobile devices have
become important part of the CX as the fastest and easiest way to pay in stores
and will continue to bring more innovation into the space.

“One of the things that’s allowed us to get a lead in mobile
payments is that we did not try to go for example, right to the cloud or right
to some sort of tap to pay, although we do plan in the future on implementing
whatever is suited and most convenient to our customers,” he added.

Additionally, Starbucks recently passed almost four million
Twitter follower mark, and while its global Facebook following allows the firm
to engage with our customer’s every day, “Our internal measures tell us that
these digital initiatives have added demonstrable impact to our US business
with the promise of even greater growth in the months and years to come. We are
not resting on any of our previous successes,” said Brotman.

To date, Starbucks has a robust pipeline of developments in
each area of its digital ecosystem and it expects to deliver a number of
improvements and innovations through its existing programs and introduce new
concepts. For instance, one new initiative is a partnership with Duracell to
trial wireless charging for our customer’s mobile devices in select Starbucks
stores in Silicon Valley. The installation of multiple wireless charging
Powermat services in our stores will allow Starbucks customers to easily
recharge their smartphones.

Brotman said, “This is a kind of improvement to the digital
experience that our customers expect from Starbucks and the kind that we will
deliver at scale moving forward.”

Furthermore, Brotman said work is underway to accelerate the
digital strategy globally. China, for example, already has 2.5 million My
Starbucks Rewards members without a mobile payment platform or eGifting in
place. The company has even made mobile payment available to apps on Android
and iOS to Starbucks customers in the Hong Kong market.

“I truly believe that no other retailer is as far along as
Starbucks in terms of building an end to end digital customer experience across
a variety of digital touch points both in-store and out of store, across channels,
and now across geographies,” Brotman said. “We are truly only just getting
started.”

Amanda Ciccatelli, Social Media
Strategist at IIR USA, has a background in digital and print journalism,
covering a variety of topics in business strategy, marketing, and technology.
She previously worked at Technology Marketing Corporation as a Web Editor where
she covered breaking news and feature stories in the tech industry. She
can be reached at aciccatelli@iirusa.com. Follow her at @AmanadCicc.

Wednesday, August 7, 2013

Today, companies of all shapes and sizes are struggling to keep
up with the fast-changing customer experience landscape. In fact, a Harris
Interactive survey found that in the United States, 68 percent of
consumers say brands need to find ways to offer more customized interactions. Within
the context of persistent economic uncertainty, competition for consumers has
never been stronger. CEO of cloud
contact center provider inContact Paul Jarman recently told Wired
that organizations who ignore this demand for a personalized experience will be
at a disadvantage.

“There’s a huge amount of value in those bottomless wells of
information that most companies are under-utilizing or outright ignoring.
Mining that gold can unearth a wealth of insights and advancements that can ultimately
lead to a more forward-thinking customer experience,” he said.

Here are some key steps from Jarman that will help you give
your customers a more personalized experience:

Listen to Your
Customers

The importance of listening to the Voice of the Customer means
collecting customer feedback, using speech analytics, and listening on-demand
to customer conversations, and all of these sources of feedback to improve outcomes.
This concept is evolving to include all of the interactions that customers have
with your organization, including written communications through chat,
text/SMS, and emails that are becoming increasingly popular. So, this data
needs to be easily accessible to those interacting with customers directly.

With over one million Twitter accounts created in 2012,
social media presents new challenges and new opportunities as a key source of
customer data. In fact, a new Aberdeen Group study on using data to
deliver superior customer care finds that 60 percent of contact centers
are using social media as part of their efforts. The report shows that businesses
received about 200,000 customer requests over the past 12 months that
originated in Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn.

Personalize It

All of the data in the world is useless if you aren’t
applying it in a way that truly impacts your customers. At the most basic
level, this can happen when technology automatically provides data about a
customer in real time, allowing the call to be routed and handled accordingly. Using
a data-driven approach, a customer whose data identifies him or her as high
profile can be instantly moved to the front of the queue or routed to a more
appropriately skilled agent.

“Ultimately, data is the currency of business and the
foundation of the customer-driven economy,” said Jarman. If you really listen
to your customers and to your data, you’ll finally achieve a more holistic view
of your customer that allows you to anticipate their needs before they even
have to ask.

Amanda Ciccatelli, Social Media
Strategist at IIR USA, has a background in digital and print journalism,
covering a variety of topics in business strategy, marketing, and technology.
She previously worked at Technology Marketing Corporation as a Web Editor where
she covered breaking news and feature stories in the tech industry. She
can be reached at aciccatelli@iirusa.com. Follow her at @AmanadCicc.